Rather than logging onto your bank account, you just search “Spain” and you will see all of your spending on the last holiday.

Google Sync with Sage will ensure all your accounting and expense recording is managed automatically, with no manual effort required.

And Google will of course inform you of relevant services, so you need never look for an ATM or branch, it’s all just there in Google Maps.

This is where Google will strike to the heart of banking, as the bank becomes a back-end information feed to Google rather than the other way around.

Google enriches our lives with information: that should be their mission statement (their mission statement is actually “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”).

And with an annual R&D budget near $8 billion, they’ve got the deep pockets to do this well (as have Facebook, the nearest Google competitor out there, who have just stated that Facebook Messenger will enable payments).

About Chris M Skinner

Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, the Finanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal’s Financial News. To learn more click here...

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This is a smart post. One possibility here is that Google will develop a personal financial management platform (by integrating bank APIs — as you say). After all, Google is all about providing users with data, and that’s the heart of PFM.

Interesting post. I agree that there is a lot Google could do with financial transaction data. Personally, I feel their main focus would be on using financial data to facilitate commerce. What would be better for a merchant than have their Google ad clicked on by a consumer and then have Google help that consumer see that they could afford the purchase based on their historical spending patterns.
Of course, I think that is why PFM from their own bank or credit union will be more trusted than Google-powered PFM. Free services from Google always come with an information-sharing caveat. I would be surprised if many consumers would be allow Google that level of access to their financial information due to the perceived risk of sharing that data.

Is providing APIs to welcome the new overlords (and potentially add value) cannibalisation or the only way to survive?
I believe it’s the latter, and for the ones that get there first, there is a huge opportunity… because Google aren’t the only platform out there that could improve the transactional nature of banking.
What about Salesforce? What about Facebook? What about a push payments version of stripe.com?